President Steven B. Sample has announced the establishment of the Malcolm R. Currie Chair in Technology and the Humanities. The first holder is C. L. Max Nikias, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

“This is the first endowed chair in USC history to honor both technology and the humanities,” Sample said, “and we believe it is the first such chair at any university.”

Currie, a USC trustee and internationally renowned corporate and civic leader, said that he and his wife, Barbara, sought to establish a chair that could “recognize that many of our most effective leaders of the future will have a depth of understanding of the technologies that are changing our world as well as the breadth of vision and perspective that come from study and love of the humanities.”

Said Nikias, “It is a dream for any professor to hold an endowed chair and to be associated with the name of one of your university’s great benefactors. It is even more rewarding, and humbling, when the name of the benefactor carries a special power of its own, a power that derives from the benefactor’s own grand achievements. For this, I am deeply grateful to Barbara and Mal Currie.”

The Curries, Nikias said, have displayed “an equal passion for the timeless humanities and timely innovation. They have shown how the former is a steady foundation for the latter, and I have attempted in my own career to follow such an approach.”

Currie, who earned A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, joined the USC Board of Trustees in 1989 and chaired the board from 1995 to 2000, a period marked by unprecedented gains in academic quality at the university. He received USC’s Presidential Medallion in 2001.

Currie joined the Hughes Aircraft Co. in 1954 and steadily rose through the ranks as a researcher and executive, making major contributions in areas such as national defense, automotive electronics and satellite communications.

He served as chairman and CEO of Hughes from 1988 to 1992. In that capacity, he led an organization with about 85,000 employees and annual revenues of roughly $13 billion. Currie later was named Hughes’ chairman emeritus.

During his storied career, he also headed research and development for Beckman Instruments, where he led the development of scientific and medical instrumentation.

In 1972, he was named to the number three position at the Department of Defense as Under-Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, responsible to Congress for such programs as research and weapons systems development. There, he initiated programs that continue to be significant to national security as well as programs such as global positioning systems for space applications.

In recent years, Currie has been an entrepreneur with a special interest in developing environmentally friendly and effective modes of personal transportation.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also holds the rank of Commandeur in the French Legion of Honor.
Nikias is an internationally recognized expert in digital media and signal processing.

During his 17 years on the USC faculty, he has helped bring several national high-technology research centers to the university, including the Integrated Multimedia Systems Center. He also has been an active champion of the arts and humanities at USC.

The goal of the Visions & Voices Initiative, which he launched two years ago, is to offer USC students a unique educational opportunity that capitalizes on USC’s outstanding arts schools and its location in a creative capital. In 2006, Nikias also established the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics. The institute, made possible by a gift from Norman Levan, organizes and issues a grand challenge to every new USC student: to engage with, understand and be informed by the timeless values that rest at the core of humanity.